We are continually developing open source tools and services to support digital libraries and the cultural heritage sector. Find out what we're working on and how to contribute.

Tools

We’ve been working with developers to build open source tools for presenting digital library content online. Developers and researchers are welcome to use and contribute to the code repositories hosted on Github.

Universal Viewer

The Universal Viewer (UV) is a deep-zoom viewer using OpenSeadragon and the IIIF Image API. It supersedes Wellcome Library’s first digital asset viewer, the Wellcome Player. This is an open source project with contributions from our development partners Digirati, Wellcome Library, British Library, National Library of Wales and Villanova University. More collaborators are welcome!

Timeline

Wellcome Library needed a way to present information and images in a timeline format. This interactive timeline, developed by Digirati and Clearleft, can be reused across many content management systems. It uses jQuery, jQueryUI, moment, iScroll, jQuery Address, easyXDM, and JSON2.

MARCXML to PostgreSQL

As part of the What’s In The Library? prototyping project, our developers at Good, Form & Spectacle built this MARCXML to PostgreSQL Ingester which was used to ingest 962,000 MARC catalogue records into a database for further manipulation.

National Library of Medicine Medical Subject Headings Browser

Data standards and services

IIIF: International Image Interoperability Framework

The International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) allows students, scholars and repositories to share and compare digital images of books, manuscripts, scrolls, archival materials and more, so long as the images and the image viewers or websites are IIIF-compliant. IIIF can also enable building of applications for transcription and annotation, and quick-loading digital library interfaces.

We’re a founding member of the IIIF Consortium, and with colleagues from across an international community of research libraries, repositories and other cultural heritage institutions, we are contributing to the development of IIIF and its APIs. We will make all of our digitised content IIIF-compliant by the end of 2015.

Get in touch

We're always interested to hear about other open source digital library projects under development, and to share information about our own projects. Comments, conversation and feedback are always welcome.